SMIC N+2 in Huawei Mate Pro 60

SMIC N+2 in Huawei Mate Pro 60
by Scotten Jones on 09-08-2023 at 6:00 am

TechInsights Huawei SMIC

Up until last December I was president and owner of IC Knowledge LLC, at the end of November, I sold IC Knowledge LLC to TechInsights. It has been interesting to become an insider at the world’s leading semiconductor reverse engineering and knowledge company. The latest SMIC N+2 analysis is an excellent example of TechInsight’s… Read More


SISPAD – Cost Simulations to Enable PPAC Aware Technology Development

SISPAD – Cost Simulations to Enable PPAC Aware Technology Development
by Scotten Jones on 10-31-2021 at 10:00 am

Slide11

I was invited to give a plenary address at the SISPAD conference in September 2021. For anyone not familiar with SISPAD it is a premiere TCAD conference. This year for the first time SISPAD wanted to address cost and my talk was “Cost Simulations to Enable PPAC Aware Technology Development”.

For many years the standard in technology… Read More


IEDM 2017 Preview

IEDM 2017 Preview
by Scotten Jones on 10-20-2017 at 7:00 am

The 63rd annual IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting) will be held December 2nd through 6th in San Francisco. In my opinion IEDM is one of, if not the premier conference on leading edge semiconductor technology. I will be attending the conference again this year and providing coverage for SemiWiki. As a member of the press… Read More


An Steegen ISS Talk and Interview – Patterning Options for Advanced Nodes

An Steegen ISS Talk and Interview – Patterning Options for Advanced Nodes
by Scotten Jones on 02-28-2017 at 12:00 pm

At the ISS Conference in January, An Steegen EVP of Semiconductor Technology & Systems at imec gave a talk entitled “Patterning Options for Advanced Technology Nodes”. I was present for her talk and had the opportunity to have a follow up interview with An.… Read More


Cost Modeling as a Decision Making Tool

Cost Modeling as a Decision Making Tool
by Scotten Jones on 07-19-2015 at 10:00 am

The use of simulation is well established in the semiconductor industry. Virtually all circuit designs are run through a Spice simulation, layouts are analyzed for timing issues and even process development employs process simulation tools. What I believe is less widely used but just as useful is cost modeling.

The semiconductor… Read More


Moore’s Law is dead, long live Moore’s Law – part 4

Moore’s Law is dead, long live Moore’s Law – part 4
by Scotten Jones on 04-21-2015 at 11:00 pm

In the third installment of this series we discussed the status of DRAM scaling and Moore’s law. In this installment we will tackle logic. The focus will be on foundry logic.

Logic technology challenges
In the second installment of this series we discussed constant electric field scaling. As we mentioned in that installment at … Read More


Setting the Record Straight on FD-SOI Costs

Setting the Record Straight on FD-SOI Costs
by Scotten Jones on 07-20-2014 at 7:00 pm

I recently published an article on Semiwiki “Is SOI Really Less Expensive”. That article was the result of months of careful research and analysis. I looked at planar FDSOI versus bulk planar, bulk FinFETs and FinFETs on SOI at three different nodes. I took a consistent set of assumptions with respect to the fab used to run the processes,… Read More